Venture Center and NCL Innovations invite you to an informative and interactive discussion on the Water industry – specifically the opportunities available for impact in India.
Date: Saturday, November 13, 2010
Venue: Training Room, Venture Center, NCL Innovation Park, Pune (Address/directions: http://www.venturecenter.co.in/contact_mailinglists.php)
Time: 11am – 12.30pm
Registration: The event is free and does not require RSVP, however seating will be on first-come, first-serve basis.
Background: Venture Center's flagship program – Lab2Mkt (http://www.venturecenter.co.in/lab2mkt.php) – seeks to nucleate technology ventures around competencies developed at R&D institutions in India (eg. NCL, Pune). To develop a pipeline of potential spinoffs, Venture Center has raised a Proof of Concept (PoC) fund (http://www.venturecenter.co.in/poc.php) – this enables us to run PoC projects – each of which involves development of prototypes, creation of business models, building the entrepreneurial team, etc. NCL Innovations (http://www.nclinnovations.org/) aims to facilitate the creation of more technology enterprises using NCL know- how, expertise or involvement of NCL staff, students and alumni.
Water: One of the areas of interest for PoC/Lab2Mkt projects is Water – a $500B global industry that offers a variety of challenges & opportunities for investors and entrepreneurs in India. We have spent the past several months researching global & Indian water markets, with the intent of identifying specific market opportunities for new technology ventures.
We would like to share our findings with scientists, entrepreneurs, investors, industry professionals, etc. This is likely to be the first in a series of such water-related talks – we will begin with a high-level overview this time around – and in the future, focus on specific aspects of water (eg. VC-funded tech startups, Indian water treatment markets, etc.).
Anil Paranjape points out why this is important:
This is indeed a great opportunity to learn about opportunities in the water sector. It's one of the most under-rated, under-funded and under-innovated fields in cleantech. But it's also one of the most critically endangered resource. Investors and researcher the world over are rapidly waking up to the challenges and potential in it.
Anyone with an entrepreneurial bent and ambition should definitely learn to see how they can participate in this opportunity. Huge opportunities in water will be created in the next few years/decades. Water is at a stage today that the Internet was in early 1990s: it's absolutely a huge ground-floor opportunity now!